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1948 onwards: Young me

Hounslow 1948-1953How can one ever be sure what it was like to start life? My
image of what it was like to be young is indelibly altered by hearing tales
from my long-dead parents and from my brothers, by looking again and again at
those old photos, which showed me as a curly browned haired, happy child, teeth
bared in what I thought was the smile required for the camera and its expensive
photographs. I still can’t force a photogenic smile today. If I try I look more
like a tortoise, I’m told.

So be it. I was born on 29thJuly 1948, on my eldest brother Robin’s
second birthday (yes, Jeremy came in-between, only ten months before me), at
the West Middlesex Hospital. That made us a self-contained gang, though we were
never quite so, but at least a group whose members always had someone to play
with. We lived in Hounslow, at 62 Bulstrode Avenue. I walked along the street a
few years ago, and couldn’t believe how the house had shrunk and changed
colour.

Rationing was still in force. Trolleybuses were common. Birthdays and
Christmases, despite my mother, and therefore technically me, being Jewish, were
joys, especially with the wider family. I’m not sure when a little child
becomes conscious of its immediate and more distant family, but at some stage I
became aware of the family around me, the existence of a parallel Stone family
nearby, in Teddington, my father’s younger brother Ralph, my Aunt Gillian and
eventually a brood of five to equal ours, with our Grandmother Nana living in
an annex. Gillian and Ralph are dear to me, the last of their generation.
Gillian was the daughter of Gilbert Sale, who had been my mother’s manager in
the Palestine Forestry Commission. She was introduced to Ralph by my parents,
always matchmakers, and love took its course. Gillian was a second mother for a
while, especially to Jeremy, caught in the middle of the elder three.

Nana was a figure of ultimate distinction in my young eyes, silver haired,
Roman-nosed, broken-wristed, with a classic English accent, slightly upper
class but not drawling, smooth delivery of interesting words, loving and full
of interesting facts. She had divorced in the 1930s, my grandfather ending up a
prisoner at Singapore before his successful life in Australia, including a new
wife and son, giving us half-cousins, including my father’s namesake Brian.

Brian. We called him Brian. I can’t remember ever calling him anything else.
The polar opposite of Mummy, Yocheved in Hebrew – meaning God’s glory, Yvette
in French from her education in Jerusalem’s Alliance Française. Brian, one leg
blown off when his tank brewed up in the Western Desert, minor war hero with a
Military Cross for capturing several Germans, so we were told, but I can’t
remember by whom, the other leg filled with shrapnel, went to then Palestine to
work as a civil servant and journalist, met my mother, a renegade from an
orthodox Jewish family, who fell in love with the broad-shouldered, smiling,
blond, blue eyed, swaggering hero, and married him in the Rabbinate in
Jerusalem, him learning his few Hebrew words required to accept her as his
wife. “You are hereby consecrated to me by the law of Moses and Israel”.
Stamping on the glass under the cloth must have been fun. Honeymoon in Cyprus
was followed by her pregnancy and the premature birth of Robin, said to have
been triggered by the blowing up of the King David Hotel, by the Jewish
resistance organisation, Irgun, on July 22nd, 1946. The hotel was
the headquarters of the British government of Palestine and more importantly
the intelligence section which focused on the Irgun and other Jewish military
organisations. My parents lost friends in the attack, and it was said to have
triggered Robin’s premature birth a week later. They came to England soon
after, Robin in a wooden orange box.

It took me some time to become conscious of this heritage. We were brought up
in an agnostic household, and it was only some time after we moved to Brighton
when I was five that I started to go to Reform Synagogue and Sunday school, the
latter to learn Hebrew. Other parts of my heritage dawned on me even later,
such as that of my father’s late elder brother Philip’s role as a bomber pilot,
dying when shot down over the Netherlands, a life that only meant something to
me when I read his diaries in this century. My Israel heritage became
meaningful when I first visited after my operation, in 1975. Robin had been
much more forward, working on Kibbutz Ma’ayan Zvi between school and university
in 1963, and returning to help in the June War of 1967.

Hounslow in the early 1950s was a product of the inter-war years, concrete
offices and shops, red-brick housing terraces, and above all red London buses.
For decades afterwards, when living away from London, the sight of a red London
bus lifted my heart. But memories of that time are patchy – finding with Jeremy
an Old English Sheepdog dead by the Great West Road, a trickle of blood from
its lips, and not knowing what to do, seeing the meteorite in Lampton Park, my
brother Oren arriving in a home birth, me being sleepy on Brian’s shoulders at
the coronation fireworks by the Thames, and the London taxi in which he
converted the front luggage space by installing a seat and a wooden door – no
construction and us, or health and safety rules then! BYR138 was the
registration.

My parents friends that stayed beyond this era – and therefore whom I remember
- included John and Shirley Cain – he a producer with the BBC, she an actress
whose beauty and charm entranced us. I remember too John’s brother Michael, who
if I remember correctly had a thalidomide child. Their mother, whom we knew as
Mrs Cain, had apparently had a colostomy. My parents later told me that she
dealt with it by a primitive kind of nappy – more of this later!

One acquisition from this period was our tortoise, Terry, who stayed with us
for many years until he died during hibernation one year.

More detailed memories belong to Brighton, where we lived from when I was five
to eleven, and then from fifteen onwards. I finally left Brighton after
completing my doctoral work in 1972 – it took me another three years to get the
degree. So the memories of place may date from any time, so I cannot be sure
that I am remembering places from when I was five or twenty four.

Brighton 1953-1959Brian was a schoolteacher. He moved from Hounslow’s Isleworth Grammar
School to Brighton’s Varndean Boys Grammar School, to head the English
Department, and so began our love affair with Brighton.

My memories of the five years between our move to Brighton and the move to
Loughborough, where Brian went to head the English Department in one of the
country’s top teacher training colleges, and one of the top three sporting
colleges in the country, jostle with each other for a place on this page. By
the time we got to Brighton in 1954 we were four boys, and by New Year’s Day of
1957 we were joined by our sister Miriam, a curly-haired lisping blonde whose
five male adorers thoroughly spoiled her.
Apart from the odd brush with school teachers for being a bit rumbustious – for
example for knocking girls down in the playground after they had asked for our
game Hot Rice – in which we had to throw a rubber or tennis ball to hit other
players on the legs, upon which they changed sides, I was a good if slightly
talkative schoolchild., but no match for a bully named Barry who was
transferred from the Whitehawk area of Brighton – one of its roughest.

Brighton was a great place in which to grow up. The sea and beach were the main
attraction, but closely followed by the many parks. Blaker’s Park was our local
one, the giant Preston Park with its cricket pitch and velodrome quite near,
with the Rockery, modelled on the Willow Pattern plate. The Downs surrounded
the town, and we would often cycle to Ditchling Beacon or further afield. We
would often go to the Devil’s Dyke, loving running down its steep sides, only
to be faced with the gruelling walk back up. Beachy Head was also a favourite,
and my mother would scream with alarm as the four of us milled about near the
cliff edge, encouraged by Brian. I suppose my love of green rolling hills
started here.

Brighton was also the period of the “Stratford Camps”. Brian would take a large
group of Varndean boys camping to see the Royal Shakespeare Company at its
prime, with the theatrical knights – Olivier, Richardson, Gielgud and others –
commanding the rapture of their audiences and occasionally forcing me to keep
my eyes open as we sat in the cheap seats high and at the back. Once we had a
no-seat ticket, and I fell asleep on the stairs of the aisle. But I remember
the atmosphere and the sounds, and it was certainly not an experience that put
me off literature as it might have done. The camps were the thing, though.
Imagine being spoiled by thirty or forty boys ten or more years older. I
remember one arrival was in the rain, and hulky sixth formers donned their
bathing costumes to put up the tents. We had acquired a new Bedford Dormobile,
SCD 260. The London taxi was donated to the school for the boys to dismantle.
There was a special tent that covered the back of the Bedford so that we were
in relative civilisation. The camp fires every night, the songs, the comfort
food of soup, baked beans and sausages, the tinned fruit along with (yum!)
evaporated milk, tea with condensed milk, enormous catering tins of jam much
loved by the wasps when they were empty, created in me an enduring love for
comfort (junk?) food. Rationing was over and we could let rip. We camped on Sir
Fordham Flower’s land – he of Flower’s Ales. His daughters, much older than us,
were accomplished horsewomen (though they were teenage girls in fact) and we
boys were in awe of them. They encouraged us to roll in the hay, which meant
only jumping off high-stacked bales onto lower bales, sadly. We swam in the
then-clean River Avon. We looked forward to Stratford every year, and were sad
when it was over.

My father’s colleague teachers were a lovely bunch. I remember “Bubble” Wylie
and Seth Cain, who was very intense and to our sadness later committed suicide.
Michael McGowan was a handsome, balding, Spanish looking bachelor with a big
white smile which made the women swoon – I think my parents ushered him through
several love affairs, trying to repeat their earlier matchmaking successes.

I can remember some of my schoolmates at the Downs County Primary School, which
was just 10 minutes walk from our house (who had lifts to school in those
days?). It was a typical British primary school, lots of red brick (but also
with lots of local flint), three storeys, big windows in the hall. However, the
ones who stood out as friends were Barry Furlong, the son of Brighton’s Deputy
Fire Chief, who had the first television we had seen, and which converted me
into a tepid Manchester United fan after the Munich air disaster of 1958 and
Nick Steadman, whose mother had never married, but whom we admired because she
was so good to us, so careful to explain things to us. Nick was slightly
introverted, quite bright and definitely interesting and interested in all
things. It was rumoured that his father had fought in the Korean War and just
disappeared – whether from life or his wife/partner. Together with Jeremy, we
formed the Stone and Steadman Secret Service and went around committing minor
felonies, like stealing dust-caps from car tyres, or nicking penny chews from
shops or putting bangers under lovers’ cars in parks as November 5th approached.
We were occasionally caught and in one infamous case a policeman came round to
remonstrate with me. I had bent down to steal a dust-cap (we had no use for
them – it was just the challenge) and there was someone in the car, who asked
me my name and address. I blurted out the truth – I never could lie.

Somehow I remember all our schoolteachers from the four years in primary
school, though not the one year in infants – pretty, slim, Miss Batchelor whose
loss to us we mourned when she became Mrs Bredon, the tough Mrs Austin, firm
Mrs Parks, and smiling but really ferocious curly white haired Miss Cox –
custodian of 4A and therefore the school’s reputation for getting us safely
into grammar schools. I remember meeting Miss Cox later on and couldn't believe
how small she was. She, like Mrs Parks, had towered over us with her enormous
bust when we were young.

I loved maths and logical subjects but couldn’t stand art. I was once forced to
stay in to complete a painting when I finished off half the page by just
painting the bottom half green for grass and the top half blue for sky. I was
forced to put figures and trees into it.

We were regulars at Rabbi Rosenblum’s Reform Synagogue in Holland Road. I had
never been to an Orthodox synagogue – that was much later – so didn’t
appreciate the relaxed atmosphere, the cake and orange squash after the
service. The Rabbi’s beautiful tenor voice sung out much of the service. I went
to the Sunday School as well, learning rudimentary Hebrew, enough of a
foundation for much later. I learned the basic prayers, parrot fashion, not
understanding their meaning. An additional complication was that I was a member
of the Cubs at Stanford Avenue Methodist Church at the end of the road where we
lived (Southdown Avenue), and often went to church services in my uniform. No
wonder I became confused and then an atheist. By the time we left Brighton,
Jeremy and I were joint Senior Sixers, though we were not badge-collecting
fanatics.

Jeremy and I fell under the influence of a former Christian missionary, Madame
Margaret Field, who lived not far from us in Florence Road. I don’t mean that
she tried to convert us, but she was just so good to us, giving us some of her
Indian metal artefacts (elephants, carts drawn by cows), and entertaining us
with short tales of her life in India. Another older lady who influenced us in a strange way was our next door
neighbour, Miss Sands. I am not sure whether she liked us, but occasionally she
would throw over the wall some of the most beautifully illustrated books about
the British Army in the Boer and First World Wars. The full page, full colour portraits
of the generals were particularly striking. One name that stuck in my head was
Sir Bindon Blood!

Somehow we acquired an old 78 rpm full size gramophone – was it from Miss
Sands? I can’t remember. The Inkspots and their Java Jive sticks in my memory.
I love coffee, I love tea
I love the java jive and it loves me
Coffee and tea and the jivin’ and me
A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!
I love java, sweet and hot
Whoops! Mr. Moto, I’m a coffee pot
Shoot me the pot and I’ll pour me a shot
A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup!
Oh, slip me a slug from the wonderful mug
And I cut a rug till I’m snug in a jug
A slice of onion and a raw one, draw one.
Waiter, waiter, percolator!
and so on.

Nymphs and Shepherds, the Warsaw Concerto and a host of other classical pieces
half-surface from these times.

We still often saw the Teddington Stones – they were after all only a couple of
hours away in the days before the motorway. They visited us and we them. Nana
often came to stay. I remember one awfully foggy day – Gatwick Airport is still
famous for its fogs, which have geographical, not manmade causes – my father
driving up the middle of the dual carriageway with almost no visibility and no
fear of going into the back of something, as there were so few cars. Most people
travelled by bus and train, and Brighton still had its trolleybuses, which were
ideal for Brighton’s steep hills, though occasionally they would lose their
contact with the wires and we would have to wait until men came along to push
the trolley arms up to the wires. Their acceleration was savage, and many an
old dear – for Brighton was already a retirement haven – nearly lost their
footing as the bus jerked away from a stop. Alas, they are gone.

I don’t remember the weather, only the stormy days when we would go down to the
sea and along the groynes to enjoy the smashing of the waves against their
walls or against the big pebbles on the beach, with us trying in vain to dodge
the resulting spray. To me, this first period in Brighton, and the time in Loughborough,
were perpetually sunny in my mind, even though there were a few accidents, like
coming off my bike after being forced into the kerb by a bus – it was probably
my fault for overtaking on the inside, but I don’t think danger meant anything
to us, just a few cuts and bruises. I remember swimming in the North Road baths
and occasionally in the salty King Alfred’s baths - much farther and more
expensive.

I can’t recall much about our holidays, except that once we went in a Bristol
freighter – Dormobile and all - from Lydd to Le Touquet. This might have been
for our holiday to Switzerland, where we stayed in Vevey, near Lake Geneva. I
remember swimming out into the lake and being scared by weeds pulling me down,
being stung on the foot by a bee that I had trodden on while walking on a lawn
by the lake, and the stern, tall, smiling stationmaster who warned us when
trains were coming – we loved to watch the big Swiss electric locomotives.

The other holiday I remember was at Pwllheli in Wales. The farmer (Mr Evans?)
on whose land we were camping watered down the milk he sold us, and I remember
the farmer’s son breaking a chicken’s neck and the chicken running around the
farmyard for some time with its head crazily flopping to one side – the
original headless chicken.
I was very prone to sore throats and ear infections – I sometimes wonder
whether all the antibiotics I took so early led to problems later on. I had my
tonsils out when I was 10, I think – I will never forget the luscious ice cream
that we were given to soothe our throats after the operation, or coming home
and coughing up a slug-like clot of blood and being very alarmed.

And then came the 11-plus that was to doom or promote us educationally. We did
lots of practice tests at school, and my father later told me I had come third
in all of Brighton. It meant nothing to me.

I had a girl friend, Diane Gillies.I was 10, she was 9. She was the daughter of a financial advisor, and was from my school, the Down’s Country Primary. Her sister Susan
was in our form, Diane a year younger. She was very pretty (of course!), fair, slightly freckled if I remember right, but most of all it was her nose, her smile and laugh and the way her eyes crinkled when she did that attracted me. I was just beginning to be conscious
that girls were nice, particularly girls like Diane. I wonder what it is that makes one like a "type". I liked both the
Gillies sisters and cried bitterly when we left Brighton. Curiously enough, I encountered Susan with her mother ten or so years later at the Theatre Royal, when I was with Carrie. I wished Diane had been there. I still remember calling on Diane, seeing the sign for her father's dentist surgery outside - was it Roy M Gillies?

Loughborough 1959-19631959 saw us travelling up the A23, then the A6, to Loughborough, where my father had taken a post as Head of the English Department, at the College of Education, more used to turning out start sports teachers than drama specialists. I was
distraught, leaving my first ever girlfriend, Diane. We wrote to each other for a bit. I remember the handwriting still. I don't remember when the writing stopped, now even how long we had been friends back in Brighton, but I am sure it was because Loughborough Grammar School now beckoned, with all the excitement of being in a big school, and tough exams in the first year to determine whether one would go into the fast stream and O Levels in four years (I did). Still, a gap was left in my life that wasn't truly filled until I married.

Loughborough may be
to some a forgotten town of the East Midlands, but to a young boy it was a
different kind of heaven. It was canal and river country, in contrast to
Sussex, where most rain sunk into the chalky soil. The Grand Union Canal, the
River Soar and the mighty River Trent, saw us walking by their sides or canoeing along them. Robin had
the canoe, famous because someone once took an air-gun pot-shot at him in it on
the canal. The offender was prosecuted.

Charnwood Forest was the site of many bike rides and rambles, its rocky granite
outcrops surrounded by ferns and pine woods, and lower down the rich arable
fields, contrasting with the sheep-filled down-land of Brighton. I became a
cross-country runner, running for the school, with many triumphs completed by a
flying run down from Charnwood to the finishing line. This was a rugby school,
perhaps why I preferred cross-country, and in the summer athletics beckoned
rather than cricket. I was never a ball game person, much though I love
watching them on television today.

Our massive Edwardian (I think) house, Ivydene, 3 Victoria Street, was
ivy-covered until Brian was advised to pull it down because it was damaging the
brickwork. The garden was an orchard until sold off to build two houses, and
the crumbling greenhouse hosted a vine. It had to be pulled down, its
substitute being a characterless lean-to which we called the “shezam”, because
Miriam or Oren referred to it as a “she’s am”. But we still had a large
stone-walled pond with goldfish. My father often referred to Loughborough as
Lowbrow – he was always a bit of an intellectual elitist. To bring in more
money, we lost our individual bedrooms, and Brian rented out a wing of the
house to various tenants, the most colourful being Bahamians, but the one who
had the most impact on me was young lecturer from the College of Education, David Clegg, from Sheffield,
simply because one day he took me for a drive over the Peak District to see his
mother, and I still remember the joy of swooping down a lane in his Land Rover,
the radio blaring out Johnny Tillotson singing Poetry in Motion, a song I have
loved ever since for this memory. We even took in paying guests. I remember a
sports tutor, Dicky Underwood, a fanatical chewer, whose chomping amazed us at
meals. I also remember a gentle Stanley Evernden, whose adopted young son, with
sticking out ears, was greeted by Oren telling his parents that he thought
their son looked like a monkey.

The house also had a garage, looking out onto the street behind us, filled with
mean terraced houses. Above it were two rooms. There was no heating, so we used
them as workshops. I started to experiment with chemistry, making explosives
and dangerous gases. I still cringe at the memory of making some chlorine and
encouraging the daughter of one of Brian’s old friends to smell it carefully.
She breather deeply and coughed all day. I learned later that she had died of
leukaemia – she was already weak and her illness known.

Our house was just five minutes from the school, whose Burton Walks – named
after the founder Thomas Burton - continued Victoria Street but the other side
of a barrier. . The school was a direct-grant school. It was private. State
pupils like us were funded by grants. I had no idea what that meant, except
that we were regarded as toffs, along with Loughborough High School girls,
compared to pupils from Loughborough College School, attached to where Brian
worked, a pure state grammar school, or (worse still), the Secondary Modern
Schools of Limehurst -girls and Garendon - boys, for those who “failed” the 11
plus examination. As we grew older the Limehurst girls would taunt us for
wearing shorts until we were in the 5th year. Or in my case, the 4th
year, because Loughborough still used the “Remove” system, made famous by
Billy Bunter stories. We began “big school” at the age of 11, in the third form
– the first and second being for younger boys in Preparatory School. Half way
through the third form, we were examined. The top third were hived off into a
class that would take four years to take Ordinary Levels. I was in this group,
which meant that being a July child and so young for my year, I would take
these exams just before I was 15. Jeremy did not get into this group. After the
fourth year, I went into Remove A and then the Fifth form, he into Lower Remove
B, Upper Remove B and then the Fifth, meaning that he was a year behind his
brother who was ten months younger than him. I never asked him later what he
felt about it – typical me.

When my hormones began to flow, I became naughty. Not seriously so, just full
of beans and myself in class, talking too much, annoying our excellent teachers
whom I now greatly respect. I was dared by my classmates to greet the art
master using the dialect greeting and his first name, “Ay oop Len.” I did. He
slapped me straight into detention, but with a smile. He must have known it was
a dare. Our French teacher Mr Gartside was young and irascible, so I became a
hero by putting a book down my trousers and deliberately inciting him to
slipper me, which he did. Hero again! My reports at the end of each term were
covered with red underlinings by the head-teacher, whom my father knew, as they
were members of the local educational establishment. The message “Could do
better” was everywhere, and in the end I did, revising flat out in the final
term to get good results.

I became a train spotter. I had a big train set, but the real thing excited me
more. Loughborough was at the intersection of two railways from London, the old
London, Midland and Scottish line from St Pancras to Nottingham, Derby,
Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds and many other northern towns, and then to
Scotland and the old Grand Central Line from Marylebone to Nottingham and
Leeds.. They were by then both drab British Railways, but these were the last
days of steam, so the locomotives were still magnificent. The line from St
Pancras had four tracks, two passenger, two freight. The West Coast main line,
the old London and North Western Railway, was being electrified, so many
expresses came through Loughborough, such as the Thames Clyde Express to
Glasgow, which used the now-closed Dove Holes tunnel in the Peak District. We
grammar school train spotters sat in the waste land at the intersection of the
lines, “copping” the steam locomotives, ranging from express Jubilees and
Patriot classes, the Black 5s and 8-freights, the 92000 series and other
locomotives built since nationalisation, to old Duck-6s from the First World
War (so called because their wheel format was 0-6-0 i.e. no front or rear undriven axles, just 3 axles - 6 wheels - connected to the cylinders). I still remember all these names. We also “copped” increasingly frequent
diesel railcars, the big diesel-electric locomotives, particularly Peak class
and D200-ers, and the fabulous diesel-electric Midland Pullman to Manchester. A
bonus – a whole series of diesel electric locomotives were being built at the
Brush engineering works in Loughborough under our noses. We could “cop” these
Brush diesels just by looking through the factory windows. Their numbers were
chalked on them when they were still only painted in red lead. With my train
spotter friends, we travelled all over the country to visit engine sheds and
lines – Rugby to see the West Coast main line, Grantham the East Coast line,
the streamlined locomotives and the thundering Deltic diesel prototype. It
taught me much about our geography. When I studied transport economics at
university, my rail knowledge bore fruit.

The head English teacher at Loughborough was known as Ted Taylor. He carried
out what we called Ted Taylor’s Tours – walking holidays in the North. My first
was a day trip to the Peak District, and then a holiday in the Yorkshire Dales
and one in the Lake District. We youth-hostelled. These holidays confirmed my
love of striding alone or with friends over damp, wind-swept moors, divided by
granite or millstone grit dry-stone walls, accompanied by the lament of the
curlew, the constant baaing of sheep and the sweet smells of heather, moor
grass, combined with the acrid smell of peat. I think it as here that I
developed my lack of concern about getting wet, whether in the rain or because
the path had turned into a stream.

My Jewish side went into retreat in Loughborough. There was no synagogue,
though another Jew in the town co-operated by sending me with his daughters to
Hebrew Sunday School in Nottingham. Instead, I moved towards being a teenager.
I became a true teenager in my final term at Loughborough, in the summer of
1963. My father became head of a more prestigious English department, at
Brighton College of Education, and returned in the spring of that year, leaving
me to board for a term and finish my exams. I took to it like a duck to water.
One of my dormitory colleagues brought in records – not something I could
afford. I learned to love Ray Charles, Dave Brubeck and then – blowing them all
away – the Beatles with Please Please Me.

The Northern walking holidays produced a triumph of organisation for me. In
summer 1963, after I had finished my O levels, I organised a walking tour for
the three elder brothers and my good friend Anthony Acton, across Scotland, to
where we would meet with my father who was teaching summer school in Aberdeen.
I wrote to all the Youth Hostels, enclosing the Postal Orders for bookings, and
we walked from Loch Lomond to Aviemore, then taking the train to Inverness and
bus to Aberdeen. I remember being in a clinch with a Glaswegian girl in one
hostel, but not being sure what to do next – I was only 14.

The return to Brighton was to see me becoming in some ways a young adult, but
also to experience disasters with my health.

Brighton Sixth Form 1963-1966I remember standing in a room with a collection of other new boys. At the
start of the sixth form, Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School, like many
others, took in more boys, whether like me movers from different towns, those
who were dissatisfied with their existing schools, refugees from private school
fees, and the very few who were lucky enough to be “promoted” from secondary
moderns or the few technical schools that still existed. I had no idea what to
choose for A levels. I knew I wanted to do French and Maths, but was stuck for
a third subject. Robin said “Do Economics, and Public Affairs, it’s easy.” So I
did. I fared less well in my exams for this, but it became my discipline. So
much for random decisions. I was assigned to 6thArts under “Bill”
Bones, the French teacher. Everyone is the class seemed much more mature than I
was, as they were on average a year or two older than me. This told
particularly in Economics and Public Affairs, where some experience and
judgement were required. However, my brother opened the door of political
economy to me, and several boys from this and the upper sixth went to the
Worker’s Education Association evening classes in Economics, run by Dr Henry
Collins, a pipe-smoking wandering don. This was true education. French I loved and
spoke fluently, Maths was a big leap from O level, but I eventually got the
hang of it, although the maths of circular motion and other physics was tough,
though the many who were studying physics or “Double Maths and Physics” found
it easy.
The work to school was one of our joys. It took 20 or so minutes, down Preston
Drove, across London Road, up the Droveway and then Miller’s Road, after
passing under the narrow bridge under the main railway line to London, and then
turning left along Dyke Road. We generally picked up a few schoolmates on the
way. The school was less “posh” than Loughborough, as the posh boys school was
Brighton College, a Private School, but we were twinned with the Brighton High
School for Girls, a private school. I remember the embarrassing ballroom
dancing lessons, for which I had a particularly busty partner.

The school was vibrant, full of sports and culture. It was a football school,
and our sports masters were Mike Smith (who went on to manage the Welsh
football team) and Mike Yaxley, who went on to manage Brighton and Hove Albion.
I continued with my cross-country running until I fell ill. The annual Gilbert
and Sullivan opera was a great event, drawing in pupils of all ages and
talents. The year when Buttercup’s voice broke was a disaster.

As recent arrivals, we Stones were to some extent outsiders, and there was a
definite hint of freemasonry in the school – it had a lodge – which determined
who became prefects. Gregarious as ever, I made many friends very quickly, and
later became Chair of the Literary and Debating Society and of the Sixth Form
Common Room, a beautiful new building where we could exclude ourselves from the
younger rabble.

To be young in 1960s Brighton was a privilege. The 1960s music revolution was
in full swing, and we revelled in it. I was not musical, but Jeremy (piano) and
Robin (guitar) were, and so I took up the drums, but I wasn’t really that good
– I had a good sense of rhythm but I didn’t have the skills. Nonetheless we
eventually played in public later when at university. Parties were many,
providing lots of opportunities for slight intoxication and groping girls. We
blagged our way into pubs – we somehow looked older, and always enjoyed the
late night fish and chips when walking home from parties or pubs. It only took
about half an hour from the centre to our house at 18 Harrington Villas.

There was a more serious side, of course – like the long evenings spent playing
bridge with Alan Jackson, Mick Hickman, John Trory and others, whose names I
nearly remember – when they come to me I’ll update this piece.

My room faced the back garden, the tree-lined Surrenden Road, St Mary’s Roman
Catholic Church, and the allotments beside it. It was quite a wide vista, one
which I treasured given the amount of time I would spend in my bedroom later.
The house had five bedrooms, so we each had our own. Jeremy’s was the music
room downstairs. Robin and Oren were on the top (third) floor, and that’s where
we made the loudest music.

Half way through the spring term, I fell ill. My temperature soared and I was
diagnosed with glandular fever. I think I had two weeks off school, and fell
behind badly, particularly in maths. I returned to school, but two or three
weeks later, I was back in bed, this time with severe, bloody diarrhoea and
abdominal pains. The doctors didn’t know what to make of it, so they whisked me
off to Foredown Hospital on the Downs. It was an isolation hospital. They
suspected dysentery, for some reason. After many tests, as I continued to waste
away, they diagnosed ulcerative colitis, which I now know was part of the long attach of lupus on my life, fortunately not dangerous so far. I spent a total of seven and a half
weeks at Foredown. The rest of the hospital was geriatric, so once out of
isolation, I spent over five weeks in the company of old men, several of whom
died while I was on the ward. Because I was 15, I was classed as an adult,
otherwise I would have been in Brighton Children’s Hospital – much more
civilised. As so many of the old men were doubly incontinent, perhaps they felt
I would be in better company.

I finally made it home, returning to school and realising in the summer term,
only long enough to realise how much I had fallen behind. I had not been able
to do school work, instead reading my way through the turgid prose of Lords of
the Rings – thank goodness I got that over when I had lots of time on my hands.
I still had lots of pain, and had to learn to administer cortisone enemas every
other night.

In the summer term, I started to react to all the drugs they were giving me. My
limbs swelled up and capillaries burst everywhere. I had to wear sandals. So I
was hospitalised again, for just over three weeks, until they stabilised me. I
remember a man’s life being saved as he recovered from pneumonia by having his
lungs drained, and meeting a man called Paul who had lost his leg in a motorcycle
accident – then very common. In that hospital, the Brighton General Hospital, I
decided I would like them to call me David, my second name. It was an
interesting experience, but I reverted to Merlin when I got home. Of course, by
then I had missed so much schooling that I had to start the sixth form again,
so was in the same class as Jeremy, which was genuinely good. Nick Steadman
from our primary school days was also in the same class. He was an interesting
as ever, very into the Combined Cadet Force, but still a bit of an outsider,
like us.

My holidays were constrained by my health. Brian would take us to France often,
and after one of those holidays I felt I would never want to see the inside of
a church again – he just loved the history. In the end, I have become like him,
as churches are the great repository of community history.

We were at last not the only Jews in the school. There were several others, and
we had our own room during the morning prayers at Assembly, trooping onto the
balcony to listen to announcements and sing the school song – Absque Labore
Nihil. The tune of the first line could also be interpreted as the first line
of the song “Put on a Happy Face”, which appeared in the second line of each
song, so we did occasionally sing it, risking detention. The family did go to
the same reform synagogue, but not with the same regularity as when we had been
in Brighton before. By this time, air travel was becoming more common, and we
saw more of our Israeli family, my Aunt Aliza, her husband Eliezer, whom she
divorced and remarried, and my cousins Dinah – who sadly died later of cervical
cancer, and Ya’akov or Kobi, who later contracted testicle cancer but survived.
My mother’s cousin Ariella, a very pretty and vivacious redhead whom Brian
fancied desperately, made frequent appearances too. She was married to Michael
Kisch, nephew of Charles Waley-Cohen, of one of the old Jewish British military
families. Michael later ran the Israeli oilfields in captured Sinai, after the
June War of 1967. There were other visitors from the New York branch – I
remember a very pretty girl called Bonnie, or as we called her Bahnee, because
of her accent. By now, the Teddington Stones had moved to Devon, I think,
though I need to check their movements. We saw them much less, though often
shared Christmas.

I suppose I was the most conformist of the four boys – I did genuinely love
school and studying, but also loved a bit of a lark. Oren, on the other hand,
produced an underground magazine.

I turned to chess as I could no longer play sport, and played for the school
team, reasonably well, though I could never bother to learn all the moves,
which limited me. Still, I got house colours and school half colours for it,
entitling me to wear a special tie, but by then I already had a sub-prefects
tie. We sub-prefects were in a kind of limbo, picking up rotten duties and
being ejected from the prefects room at the end of breaks with the cry “Subbies
Out!” from the Head Boy, who gained his position through freemasonry, like his
brothers before him.

At the beginning of the Second Year Sixth, it was time to apply to university.
I would normally have been considered “Oxbridge” material – Sidney Sussex
College, Cambridge was the family college, though skipped by Brian, who went to
London University. Robin tried and failed. I was advised that I should stay at
home because of my health, and though I applied to other universities, was
accepted by Sussex, the radical new university in Brighton, known as Oxbridge
by the Sea for the number of Oxbridge staff who had come to lecture there. I
was only required to pass two A levels at minimum grade – the strategy used by
universities to “bag” students they wanted – rather flattering. Robin was
already studying there.

I still revised hard for A levels, mostly on the beach though occasionally in
one of the school canoes on the sea, and ended up that year looking decidedly
ethnic in the school photos, something that has come back to haunt me as
various bits of skin are cut out because of basal cell carcinoma. We elder
three fear the melanoma that killed Brian due to his history in the Western
Desert and incessant sunbathing later. Jeremy, the fairest of us, has had
melanomas and survived.
My A level results were good, and I looked forward to university.

Brighton – Sussex University 1966-1972I was lucky to have had a stressless summer. I can’t remember how well I
was, as my colitis was in remission most of the time, with occasional bouts of
diarrhoea, pain and bleeding. I know I was pretty thin. I can’t even remember
whether we had a holiday that summer – Brighton was a perpetual holiday, with
lots of parties, pubs and beach-time. I suspect we went to France to see some
more churches.

Early October 1966 saw me standing in the “Freshers queue” at Sussex
University. I was to study economics in the School of European Studies. Very
few students had the sense to take their joining instructions out of their
“Freshers envelope”. Perhaps we wanted to display our home address. I stood
next to Adam Weill, a tall, broad-shouldered South African. His address was, I
think, Tel Aviv, though now I can’t be certain whether it was Jerusalem. We
struck up conversation, and saw each other around campus occasionally, though
he was studying in a different School. I heard later that he was one of three
brothers, and that he and one of his brothers had been killed in the Israeli
army. He was a tank commander, and like many of his kind, would stand up in his
turret to get a better view rather than sheltering within the tank. That was
how he met his death, in or a short time after the June 1967 war, in Sinai. His
mother then bought a VW bus to tour Europe – a brave woman.

I remember spending much of my first year talking to other students in the
European Common Room. I was the only student studying Economics in that School,
and I was forced to study a European Literature foundation course. I was
completely out of sympathy with the course, and failed it twice. I couldn’t see
the point of the type of literary criticism that universities engaged in – I
see it more now. I was put on the Dean’s List – one step before more severe
disciplinary action. By next year, they had allowed students like me to do the
Social Science foundation course – much more sensible.

My situation wasn’t helped by the amount of beer I drunk. Like most first year
male students, we thought happiness and maturity was directly proportional to
the quantity of bear imbibed. I was also playing lots of music with my brothers
and fooling around with girls. I did however get a distinction in the
historiography course, mainly because Robin taught me how to do it. He said,
every time the text you are required to comment on makes a statement implying
causation, attack it, so I did. That distinction might have saved me.

I joined a group of Humanist students – by then my atheism was confirmed – and
several of us spent a lot of time together, debating, reflecting. One was a
pretty girl, Carolyn Watts, freckled, auburn haired and green-eyed, with a trim
figure and a retroussé nose. She had some similarities with Diane. We spent more and more time together, eventually
getting together, and then marrying at the end of the first year – we were both
just 19. She was a survivor of spina bifida, with a crease at the bottom of her
spine caused by the operation to close the end of the spine, and with a
resulting occasional mild incontinence. We were drawn to each other partly by
intellect, but I suppose the physical problems we each had created a deeper
basis for understanding. Her mother Judy was a marriage guidance counsellor,
and gave us a book, Thinking about Marriage, in which she had written the
dedication, “Just Keep Thinking”. Well, we didn’t, and though our marriage only survived just under seven years, it broke up without rancour, but when my
health was at its lowest. Still, it saw us both get First Class Honours degrees
and launch our academic careers, so I can’t complain.

Bill Watts, Carrie’s father, was a gentleman, former submariner and then
commercial traveller, whom we saw often when he visited Brighton where he had
customers. He too was a Humanist, so we had a firm basis for agreement, though
I was still a socialist then and Carrie and her family Liberals, only learning
later that they had more sense than me. Carrie told me later than when our
marriage broke up was the only time Judy had ever seen Bill cry.

We spent many weeks of our holidays at their home in Bristol. We would take the
train from Brighton, changing at Portsmouth or Southampton for the service to
Bristol. I remember that on one of these journeys on the line to Bristol, we
were in a diesel railcar and could sit right at the front with a view down the
traffic, but Carrie suddenly panicked and was in tears, and said that she
wanted to go further back down the train in case there was an accident.
Carrie’s brother Martin, also studying economics but a year behind us and at
Essex, was often there in Bristol, and he ended up getting a First and becoming
an academic too, though in Australia.

I faced the second year safely married, living in the rented top floor of a
house not far from my parents. It was owned by a big lady, Mrs Sadler, and we
stayed there until her daughter got married and needed the upper floor,
whereupon we moved out, moving first to the Dyke Road area (Colborne Road),
where we had a very strict landlady, and then eventually to Kemp Town, the main
student quarter, where we stayed in Eaton Place until the end of our first
postgraduate year. I then got an enhanced grant and we could afford to move to
a very nice flat on Marine Parade.

In the second year, I buckled down to work, not helped by a severe attack of
colitis in the middle of the year following a holiday in Paris, where I started
to belled – we somehow struggled home. The European Studies course was one of
the best things that ever happened to me, as in parallel to my economics, I
studied all the things that I had somehow avoided at school, philosophy,
history, political thought and practice, and continued with French. I was still
very naïve academically and socially, very unaware of what I was and what I
could become. It was only in my thirties that I started to develop the kind of
friendships that produced that most valuable of things – honest feedback. I
made many friends at university, though none of them survived my second
marriage – they were deemed incompatible.

Robin graduated at the end of my second year and went to teach in London – in
those days graduates did not need teacher’s certificates. Jeremy, who had
started a teacher training course in music at Brighton College of Education,
left it after a year and went to study Divinity at King’s College London. Oren
and Miriam were still at school.

In my third year, in 1969, Carrie and I both revised flat out. Assessment was
entirely by 3-hour examinations plus one dissertation. Mine was a cost-benefit
analysis of the Lewes by-pass, which involved me not just in lots of theory and
calculations, but also in sitting by the roads around Lewes counting cars on
roads that had been missed by earlier studies. When the graduation list went
up, we saw both our names at the top of the list. I certainly had not expected
it – I don’t think I even knew what a First was. I think Carrie was expected to
get a First. The economics students in the School of Social Sciences were a bit
resentful – I heard one of them ask “Who is this Merlin Stone?”, as if a
student in the School of European Studies had no right to a First.

I had interviewed for what was called an Economic Cadetship at the Treasury.
They offered me a place, meaning that they would fund my fees and living
expenses for a Master’s Degree, and then I would join the Treasury. But
Professor Tibor Barna dissuaded me from taking the enhanced grant, so Carrie
and I both got state scholarships – 50% larger than undergraduate grants – and
we began our postgraduate careers, she in philosophy, I in economics. She never
finished her doctorate – I think she had problems with completing work
associated with her condition. Mine was much delayed by more illness. I studied
transport economics with Professor Brian Bayliss (using my train spotting
knowledge!), plus some Operations Research with John Beishon, whose son, a
journalist, I met years later) and History of Economic Thought with Professor
Donald Winch. I won a doctoral grant from the Esmée Fairbairn Trust, enabling
us to move into our flat on Marine Parade. Over forty years later, as a Trustee
of Bridport Arts Centre, I met John Fairbairn, who was instrumental in helping
the Centre by giving it a grant for a new box office system.

In our postgraduate years, we kept some of our friendship with fellow students.
Some were with us for the first year because they had done four-year courses
with a year abroad, so returned for their fourth year while we were in our
first postgraduate year. Gradually a new circle of postgraduate friends
emerged, including other postgraduates and some members of staff, as we started
doing some teaching. However, Carrie and I spent much of our time together,
just we two, and when our marriage was breaking up we joked that we had spent
the equivalent of at least 20 years married life together, so we hadn’t done
badly. We had many acquaintances at university, including Raphie Kaplinsky,
Natasha’s father, and many others who became famous. The sixties had turned
into the seventies, and although we loved the music and had our kaftans, I
suppose we were more spectators than participants in the revolutions of those
years, though of course we participated intellectually. After the June war,
there was something of an anti-Israeli sentiment around, as Palestinian
propaganda got going. My view was that the Palestinians had been given Jordan,
and that many of them, if you went back three generations, were inward migrants
from Syria, Iraq and points East and North, attracted to a once depopulated
area by Jewish economic activity, just as had happened in South Africa. The
myth of the Palestinian nation had however been successfully created.

My doctorate was on new product policy. Professor Barna became my supervisor.
He was a member of the UK Monopolies Commission, a minor Hungarian economic
wizard. I preferred qualitative research, and wanted to go round interviewing
real business people about what they did, to see whether it matched theory. I
spend a lot of time at the Science Policy Research Unit, studying their work on
industrial innovation – knowledge which has stood me in good stead given my
work in the high tech industries. Tibor just wrote to all the companies he had
investigated and they welcomed me with open arms – Cadbury’s, Metal Box,
Leyland were some of the main ones, and I made many other contacts myself,
writing letters requesting co-operation using my old portable typewriter.
Fortunately the Esmée Fairbairn Trust funded my (reasonable) expenses too! No
e-mail in those days, no telephone either, let alone mobiles. I still remember
my visits to Cadbury’s and Rowntree ending with the gift of boxes of chocolate
biscuits – a real treat.

I had finished the fieldwork for my doctorate, between bouts of illness, when
the time came to apply for jobs. I was offered a post of Lecturer at the
University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. I had no
publications, and just the promise of a doctorate. In those days, less than ten
per cent of the population went to university and a third or so got upper
seconds or firsts, so I was a rare bird. This compares with around forty
percent and two thirds today. The expansion of higher education had begun, so
demand was high and supply scarce.

August 1972 saw us trekking North in a van driven by one of our very good
postgraduate friends, as neither of us could drive, with all our worldly
possessions.

Manchester 1972-1975My only visit to Manchester had been for the interview. I loved the
countryside around, through walking holidays, but knew nothing of the town. We
first rented what turned out to be a slum, with a hole in the roof, and rats,
in Queen Street, Withington. It was demolished within a few years. The landlord
and landlady were called Fidler, Jewish of course, and a not inappropriate
name, given the relationship between rent and comfort. It was there that I
started to learn to drive. But we soon put in an offer for a cottage at 106
Laneside Road, in Low Leighton, New Mills, on the borders of the Peak District
National Park. The town had the fortune to be connected to Manchester
Piccadilly (right by UMIST) by two railway lines, the one to Buxton, the other
to Sheffield. I passed my driving test at in October 1972, after many hours of
practice round the Wythenshawe housing estate, and we were free to roam, as we
did. Petrol prices were low, and we could drive to Brighton or to Scotland at
will. Carrie enrolled in a Master’s Course in Philosophy of Education at
Manchester University, where later she put an end to our marriage by meeting
“someone else”.

My health was spiralling downwards at the time, but I was fortunate in only
having to teach 5 hours per week, a very light load by today’s standards. It
was basic economics too. I put a note on my door giving one office hour for
students, which got me into trouble with the head of department, even though it
was the guaranteed hour, not implying I was only there for one hour. But I was
struggling to finish my doctorate and worked much better at home, surrounded by
the green rolling hills and dark dry stone walls of the Peak District.

The colleagues at UMIST were good, a pleasant young bunch, most stayed there
forever. However, Professor Cary Cooper became a good friend and mentor. He and
I had several things in common – we were both renegade Jews (though he from
California), we both had rocky marriages to non-Jewish wives, and we both
talked very fast.

By the end of the first year I was very ill, and in the autumn of 1973 my
situation was very bad. The specialist at Stepping Hill hospital in Stockport
said that the X-rays had shown that the muscle tissue of my colon had
pretty-well collapsed, and that I was in danger of pre-cancerous changes. His
advice was to cut it all out or risk cancer and constant illness. I went with
the recommendation,

In November 1973, I entered Stepping Hill hospital for the operation to remove
my colon, rectum, anus – everything, though I didn’t really understand it at
the time. The pre-operation counselling was non-existent, though the medical
care was excellent. At first, because the operation was so big and bloody, they
had to “clean me up”. This meant administering a strong antibiotic for a week.
It caused me to burst out into spots on the tongue, and it had to be changed.

The commonest operation being undertaken in that ward at the time seemed to be
hernias and vasectomies – the patients for the latter would wake up and look
down, still drunk from the anaesthetic, and wail “They’ve cut it off!” I
remember one man had a colostomy because of bowel cancer, and looked down at
the pink protrusion, asking “When will it go away?” The nurse told him
“Never!”, which shocked him. Again, no pre-operative counselling.

I tried to stay fit, somehow anticipating that what was to come would not be
pleasant. I would do handstands on my bed, press-ups on the floor. There was a
strong camaraderie on the ward, as patients were cut up in various ways. This was the period of the miner’s strike and three three day week under Edward
Heath’s government, and power cuts were common. The emergency electricity was
saved for the operating theatres. I hoped it would not affect me, as I was in a
bad way, lots of bleeding.
On the day of the operation, I was taken down early. The pre-med injection to
sedate me failed, and my pulse was racing in anticipation. I was wide awake
when they strapped my legs up into stirrups, and it was only then that I
realised that they would be cutting from below as well as above. I was injected
with the anaesthetic and slipped away, a familiar feeling.

I woke up trapped. There was a drip, a catheter, a bag and a drain tube going
into my rectal cavity via a tube. I felt like a fly in a spider’s web and I
cried when visitors asked me how I felt. A nurse suddenly noticed that the tube
to the vacuum bottle that was supposed to drain the cavity had not been
unclipped, so without further ado she unclipped it. There was an enormous
sucking sound and I felt as if my insides were being sucked out – well, they
were.

The stoma nurse was a man, and he was good. He explained about changing my bag,
and a patient whom I had befriended the previous week showed me the kind of
tool that a friend of his used to cut the Stomahesive, the karaya-gum based
square that protects the skin, which would otherwise suffer badly from the enzymes
present in the discharge of the small intestine. I gradually got used to
changing my bag, and was happy with no more pain and bleeding, though I felt
disfigured. It took me days before I could pee naturally, as in addition to the
“waterworks” being disturbed and possible infected, the whole of my lower
nervous system had been shocked and damaged by the immense amount of cutting –
a massive cut at the back and an even larger one at the front, plus the hole
for the small intestine to come out of.

I was two week in hospital after the operation. While I was there, a young man,
Roy Griffin, was brought in. He was what we then called a half-caste – his
father Indian, his mother white. He had been stabbed in Stockport and his
abdominal wound had been dressed in another hospital before he had been
transferred to Stepping Hill. He was on the mend, and he and I spent much time
talking, he regretting his drug-dealing past and his resolution to go straight.
Suddenly he seemed to worsen, his breathing grew more and more desperate, and
finally after about a day of his heavy breathing being audible in the whole
ward, he died. His father, who was at
his bedside, rushed out, vomiting on the floor. I asked a nurse what had
happened. She replied that they knew he was going to die when he had been
admitted, as his bone marrow had been infected by the dirty knife with which he
had been stabbed. His condition was called Gram-Negative Septicaemia – the
first and last time I have heard the phrase used, but apparently it has a high
mortality rate.

But life went on, and the day of my “release” drew near. Carrie had been
visiting me, and my parents had flown up from Brighton to visit me. So I was
not alone. I also had many visitors from the university. However, returning
alone, very thin and weak, to an old stone cottage in the depths of winter was
not much fun. I tried to commit suicide, first thinking of jumping in front of
a train and then senselessly taking a massive overdose of the sulphur drugs
with which I had been treated, without the faintest clue as to whether it would
do the trick. It didn’t, obviously. It just turned my urine very yellow.

I then decided to get on with life, and returned with gusto. I had six month’s
sick leave ahead of me, so I did what any young man would do. I got drunk a
lot, crashed my car and wrote it off, engaged in pub crawls with the local
rough necks – including one in a removal van, whose driver knocked down many a
pub wall that night and I ended up lying drunk on a main road. I joined the
local Labour party and became a responsible member of the community, and
started doing twenty five mile walks over the Peak District.

One day, my old neighbour, Arthur, asked me to come down to the local pub, The
Hare and Hounds. Arthur was quite a character. He was former (and perhaps then
current) poacher. One day he knocked on the door with a dead hare in his hand.
He wanted some of the herbs we cooked with, to flavour the hare. Who knows
where it came from? Another day he turned up with a big cut across his
forehead. It had been caused by a cross-brow wire rebounding too far. One of
his best friends drove around in a beach buggy most of the year. He had dyed
long blonde hair and had been a professional wrestler – he had that
barrel-chested build. Arthur told a tale in which this friend ha once turned up
at Arthur’s house with a rag stuffed into a hole in his chest. He had been
called by a friend of his “in the valley”, meaning down in Cheshire, whose sons
regularly beat their father up. He had gone to assist and been stabbed by one
of the sons, but none the less nearly beat their brains out against the wall.
The police had come for him, and he bared his chest, showing what had been done
to him. They did not arrest him.

On that day, there was a darts match at a pub in Hayfield, and the Hare and
Hounds team were playing. By then I had written off my car, so I together with
Arthur and one other got a lift with someone whom I had not met before but was
known to all. About a quarter of a mile down the road, he went slap into the
back of a VW Beetle, a painful experience if you know where the engine is. I
was sitting in the back seat, nearside, and my head smashed onto the seat in
front, leaving me needing stitches. Arthur, beside me, nearly had a heart
attack (he was well into his seventies and smoked heavily). The man in front of
me had his ankle broken, but the driver was not hurt, as the impact had not
been direct but glancing. When the owners of the VW came out of their house, he
asked to go to the bathroom as he was feeling sick. When the police came, they
knocked on the door, but he had gone. The car was stolen. He was now living in
Birmingham, and had come up to New Mills for the funeral of his brother who had
driven a stolen car into a canal! When the police took a look at who was in the
ambulance, they recognised me from my Labour Party work and said, “Goodness me,
you’re in with a rough lot!” I realised then that as a middle class southerner,
I had no clue as to the under-currents of the town. I later learned that New
Mills had one of the highest crime rates in the country for a town of its size,
said to be due to the fact that many Manchester people had moved there because
it recovered early from the Great Depression and so it had a weak social
structure, unlike many Northern small towns. For example, in one of the many
murders that had taken place, the victim was found enclosed in a dry stone
wall.

And I finished writing my doctorate.

During this strange time of post-operative recovery and getting used to wearing a bag, I had an affair with a married woman - she and her husband were both very active in the Labour Party. I guess I lost my sense of what was reasonable behaviour. We didn't get up to much - my whole lower body was still in shock from the operation, with many of the relevant nerves cut through or damaged, but we tried. Fortunately, I did recover quite soon.

By the autumn of 1974 I was ready to go back to work, physically but not
emotionally. I never talked to anyone about what I had suffered until I met
Kathryn. I held it all in. I wanted to throw everything away, start again, and
when my brother Jeremy suggested that I take up the drums again and go to South
Africa (in Apartheid days) with him, I agreed and gave in my notice for the end
of the Spring Term 1975. By this time Carrie and I were divorced

I had been assured of a research job at Bath University by my former transport
economics tutor, Brian Bayliss, now a Professor there. But I threw away the
interview, not deliberately, but my mental state must have made itself obvious.
So I decided to go to Israel for the first time, and arranged to visit my aunt
Aliza there (I think my mother put pressure on her to accept the visit). There
I met Ofra, my second wife, who was to become mother of my two daughters Maya
and Talya. By this time I had been examined for my doctorate and been accepted
with a few changes to be made to the literature review. I was an economist and
had strayed into marketing, but hadn’t done the marketing reading, which I was
required to do. This confirmed me as a marketing man.

Meanwhile, I had interviewed for a post as a Senior Lecturer in Economics at
the then Kingston Polytechnic, and was accepted for Autumn 1975, at nearly
double the salary that I had at Manchester, enabling me to put down a deposit
for a house in Kingston, despite not having much left from the sale of the
cottage in New Mills.